It’s Thanksgiving and the Black Friday weekend, but none of that matters to science! We’ve got some great and strange space and tech news waiting for you just past the jump.
Go with the flow
“Mexican entrepreneurs developed a system capable of using the vehicular flow to generate electric energy. This development has the potentiality to produce sufficient electricity to power up a household through a device that “catches” the force of the moving cars.”
I’m sailing away
Ants should scare you. They’re so close to supplanting you on the food chain it isn’t funny. Fire ants especially, with their terrifying numbers and wicked bites. Oh, did I mention they can swim? They form living rafts so entire colonies can escape flooding, clambering over each other and constantly forming and reforming the structure. Enjoy sleeping.
Better bricks by beer brewing
EU restrictions on carbon emissions have driven brick companies to new heights of creativity. A number of them are experimenting with using leftover grains from brewing to insulate their brick mixture rather than the more traditional polystyrene. Results show that the new bricks aren’t just tastier, they’re better in every way. Every way except one, according the the Acme Brick Company, who “abandoned experiments because the stench of the moist grains was overpowering.”
Geotag your memories
“Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form “geotags” for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.”
Coral treatment
Studies are showing that calcium carbonate, like that found in sea coral, improves bone grafts. Yet another reason not to dig up the Great Barrier Reef. From Science Daily, “The results of the small clinical study, which have been published in IOP Publishing’s journal Biomedical Materials, showed that bone healing was observed in each of the patients after four months and that the CHACC had fully biodegraded after two years.”
